


interlude: words were never easy

by sevensevan



Series: from dawn [4]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Coming Out, F/F, best bro, oliver and sara are still bros, oliver is the most supportive bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 05:58:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10984797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevensevan/pseuds/sevensevan
Summary: Takes place in the from dawn 'verse, between chapters 1 & 2 of "it never felt right calling this just friends". Sara tries to come out to her family, only it's less coming out of the closet and more falling out headfirst.





	interlude: words were never easy

**Author's Note:**

> okay so this is not the second chapter. it takes place between chapter 1 and the coming-not-very-soon chapter 2 (more on that later). i stuck it in its own fic because, quite honestly, it does pretty much nothing to further the plot of the original fic. however, i do think sara's coming out is something that should be addressed in this 'verse at some point. so here it is. i read over it a few times, but it isn't betaed, so apologies for any mistakes.

“Do you truly believe you are ready for this?” Sara sighs at the question and kisses Nyssa’s temple with exasperated affection. They’re lying on the grass, half-asleep, under a tree; it isn’t the tree outside their dorm room windows, but one behind the school, where they’re hidden away from the world. Nyssa is curled into Sara’s side (when Sara first discovered her girlfriend was not only a cuddler, but a little spoon, she teased her mercilessly for nearly a week), one hand gently fisted in the hem of Sara’s tee shirt. Sara doesn’t even open her eyes as she responds.

“We’ve been over this a hundred times, babe,” she says wearily. “I’m sure. Now let me sleep.” The hand in Sara’s shirt tightens, and Sara sighs again before opening her eyes.

“I am sorry,” Nyssa says hesitantly, and the formal phrasing that her girlfriend tends to slip into when she’s nervous makes Sara smile, the way it always does. “I should not be so worried. Your father is a good man. It is just that my own experiences with fathers…are not as reassuring.” Sara drops her played-up frustration for a moment, lifting her head up to look directly at Nyssa.

“Hey,” she says softly. She reaches up and pushes that strand of dark hair that never fails to fall into Nyssa’s face behind the other girl’s ear, before pressing a gentle kiss to her lips. “Your father is an unbearable asshat,” she announces when she pulls away, making Nyssa’s eyes dance with affection and humor.

“Don’t ruin the moment,” Nyssa mumbles, tucking her head back into Sara’s neck. Sara laughs and relaxes again.

“I mean it when I say I’m ready, you know,” she says after an indeterminate amount of time (the minutes seem to pass differently here, in this space in the afternoon sunlight, with just the two of them and warmth and love). “It’s going to be okay. And even if it isn’t, there’s nothing my dad could say that could ever make me love you any less.” Nyssa says nothing, but Sara can feel her smile into her neck.

 

XxX

 

Nothing goes as planned, which, after the fact, Sara supposes she should have expected. Nothing in her life ever seems to go the way she expects.

She wrote a speech. Granted, it was mostly to soothe Nyssa, but still, she _wrote a speech_.

And then her father shows up twenty minutes early, and Sara’s well-planned coming out involves less emotional conversation and more emotional scarring, since Quentin walks in when his daughter is halfway through the process of taking off her girlfriend’s shirt.

(In hindsight, his early arrival was most likely for the best. The situation was only going to escalate, and at least in this scenario, they were still wearing the majority of their clothes.)

“So,” Quentin says later, while they’re sitting in the car. He keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the road; he hasn’t looked his daughter in the eye since the dorm room (Sara is desperately hoping it’s out of mortification and not anger).

“So,” Sara echoes. The silence stretches, and she’s seriously tempted to turn on the radio to break the tension in the vehicle.

“You’re…what, you’re gay now?” Quentin sounds gruff at the best of times, and his natural rough, angry tones are doing nothing to quell the knot of anxiety in Sara’s stomach.

“No,” she corrects. “I’m bisexual.” Quentin grunts. Sara can’t tell if it’s his _confused-but-acknowledging_ grunt, or his _I-don’t-believe-a-word-you’re-saying-young-lady_ grunt (she’s on the receiving end of the latter much more often than the former). 

“Bisexual,” he repeats. “Isn’t that the same thing?” Despite her current state of paralyzing fear, Sara finds it within herself to roll her eyes angrily at the comment.

“No, it is not,” she says fiercely. “It’s LG _B_ T, Dad. We have our own letter.” Quentin grunts again. This time, Sara is fairly sure it’s his _I’m-going-to-pretend-I-understood-that_ grunt.

“But you’re dating a girl,” he states.

“Yeah, I am.” Quentin nods slowly, mulling it over. He glances at Sara out of the corner of his eye.

“And she’s good to you?” he asks gruffly. “She treats you right? She makes you happy?” Sara feels the balloon of stress and fear in her chest begin to deflate.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Yeah, she does. Her name is Nyssa and she’s kind and caring and, like, crazy smart, and I just…I really, really love her, Dad. She makes me feel invincible.” Quentin nods sharply, which is about as close to a smile as he’s willing to give when it comes to one of his daughters dating anyone (Tommy Merlyn got a handshake, but Oliver Queen got a shouting match and an unsubtle “accidental” display of Quentin’s gun, so Sara will take what she can get).

“Okay, then,” Quentin says.

“Okay,” Sara agrees, and if her voice is a little rough with tears of joy and relief and a mess of other emotions that she can’t even begin to sort out, neither of them mention it.

 

XxX

 

“You told Laurel yet?” Oliver asks, handing Sara her coffee and sitting down across from her with his own. Felicity isn’t present this time, as she’s off at an internship in Central City for the summer. Sara hasn’t heard much from her, other than a few phone calls involving rapid topic switching between the difficulties of not seeing Oliver every day (while Sara could not be happier for her two friends, she’s beginning to think they’re a bit codependent), in-depth technological explanations of all of S.T.A.R. Labs’ most interesting experiments (Sara has no idea where Felicity got the _highly incorrect_ impression that Sara might understand a word of her gibberish about particle accelerators and theoretical physics), and a garbled rundown of Felicity’s new best friend’s horribly sad love life. Sara thinks his name was Barry. Possibly Bart.

“No,” Sara answers Oliver, sipping her cappuccino and making a judgmental face at Oliver’s black coffee. Oliver gives her one of the neutral-yet-pointed looks he’s becoming an expert at.

“Why not?” he says. “She won’t be mad. You know Laurel. She couldn’t care less if you date a girl.” Sara nods, staring into her mug.

“I know that,” she says. “It’s…I don’t know. I have this weird fear that once I tell her, things will change. She’ll treat me differently.” She darts a glance at Oliver. He laces his fingers together around his mug, gazing at her pensively. “I know it’s stupid,” Sara mutters.

“It’s not stupid,” he corrects immediately. “Sara, I’m not going to pretend to know what it feels like to tell someone something like this. But whatever you’re going through, it’s not stupid.”

“It kind of is,” she argues childishly. “It’s _Laurel_ , for fuck’s sake. Like you said! She won’t care that I’m bi. I’m just…being stupid.” Oliver sighs and sips his coffee.

“You know, before Felicity figured out how I felt about her, I was terrified,” he reveals. “Logically, it didn’t make any sense. Even if she didn’t feel the same way, I knew, on a rational level, that she would never let something like that interfere with our friendship. But that didn’t matter.” He sips his coffee again. Sara wonders idly when Oliver had learned to be so unnecessarily dramatic. “Fear isn’t rational or logical,” he states. “Especially not where love is concerned.” Sara half sighs, half groans, tipping her head forward to glare at the table.

“You’re really unhelpful, you know that?” she grumbles. Oliver smirks at her before becoming serious once more.

“This isn’t something anyone can tell you how to do, Sara,” he says gently. “Especially not me. But here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to tell Laurel, in whatever way you’re comfortable with, when you’re ready. And then you’re going to have one more person who loves you for who you are. _Every_ part of who you are.” Sara eyes him appraisingly.

“You would’ve never been able to give a speech like that two years ago,” she comments. “Felicity’s good for you.” Oliver gets that look on his face that’s become very familiar to Sara, familiar enough for her to start mentally referring to it as his Felicity look: all soft grin and warm eyes and the slightest hint of a blush behind the stubble he’s been attempting to grow out.

“Yeah,” he agrees, gazing down at his phone, lying face-down on the table, where Sara knows his lockscreen is a photo of Felicity, glasses off and hair down, laughing so hard she’s almost crying. “She is.”

 

XxX

 

As it turns out, Sara’s second try at coming out doesn’t work out, either. She’s sitting at the table in the kitchen flipping through photos of Nyssa (some could be passed off as friendly: Nyssa glaring jokingly and covering half her face with a book, Nyssa sleeping on the couch in the student lounge in their dorm building, a short video of Nyssa throwing rocks at Sara from twenty feet up in a tree while laughing hysterically; others, though, the photos that Sara lingers on, are so much more than that: Nyssa wrapped up in nothing but the sheets of Sara’s bed with messy hair and sleep in her eyes, a blurry shot of Nyssa smiling as Sara presses kisses along her jawline, a photo Nyssa had taken of herself with Sara sleeping curled up on top of her) when a familiar voice says from behind her, “So much for not being gay.”

“Bisexual,” Sara corrects automatically, before her body turns to ice and she spins in her chair to face her sister. “Laurel,” she breathes. “How…how much of that did you see?” Laurel raises an eyebrow skeptically at Sara.

“Seriously?” she asks. “You just _told me_ that you’re bisexual.” Sara nods, exhaling shakily.

“And that…that doesn’t bother you.” Sara speaks it like a statement, but both of them can hear the pleading note in her voice. “You’re not going to see me differently, or–“

“Sara,” Laurel interrupts. “I’ve known you liked girls since you were eight and you told me that you didn’t get why girls on TV shows always fought over boys when they could just date each other, since they were always prettier than the boys anyway.” Sara looks away, a tentative smile half-formed on her face.

“I stand by that statement,” she mumbles. Laurel steps forward and gently grips Sara’s shoulders, turning her back to face her older sister.

“Hey,” Laurel says quietly. “You’re my annoying kid sister, and I love you, and who you date is not going to change that.” Sara nods, stands abruptly, and throws her arms around her sister. Laurel stumbles forward, laughing, but hugs the shorter girl just as tightly. “I still want to meet Nyssa, though,” she mumbles into Sara’s ear. “I have to make sure she’s good enough for my baby sister.” Sara steps back and rolls her eyes.

“I’m _sixteen_ ,” she complains, exasperated. “You’re _two_ years older than me.”

“A baby,” Laurel repeats, and Sara laughs this time. For the first time since she had realized she was more than a little bit in love with her best friend, she allows herself to completely, wholly relax.

**Author's Note:**

> right, so here's the deal with the second chapter of it never felt right calling this just friends: it IS coming. but it's going to be awhile. i'm going overseas with my family for a few weeks, so i won't have much time to write. it will be up by mid-july or so if everything goes to plan (which, as clearly illustrated by this fic, it usually doesn't). for the reader who requested a story in this 'verse where Nyssa meets Quentin, Laurel, and the rest: all that will be in chapter 2. i'm not ignoring you, i promise. in other news, i am actively looking for a beta. if you're interested, hit me up over on tumblr @daisys-quake. i only post like once every three months so it really won't be that much work, but i do need someone who can edit quickly and thoroughly. anyway, leave kudos and a comment and follow the from dawn series, because i have a LONG list of fics i want to write in this 'verse (next up after chapter 2 is a tommy/laurel one shot because tommy merlyn was a pure angel who deserved BETTER).


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